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Agility@Scale: Strategies for Scaling Agile Software Development

Scott is a Senior Consulting Partner of Scott W. Ambler and Associates, working with organizations around the world to help them to improve their software processes. He provides training, coaching, and mentoring in disciplined agile and lean strategies at both the project and organizational level. He is the founder of the Agile Modeling (AM), Agile Data (AD), Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), and Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) methodologies. Scott is the (co-)author of 19 books, including Disciplined Agile Delivery, Refactoring Databases, Agile Modeling, Agile Database Techniques, The Object Primer 3rd Edition, and The Enterprise Unified Process. Scott is a senior contributing editor with Dr. Dobb's Journal and his company home page is ScottWAmbler.com

When you are first adopting agile techniques in your organization a common strategy is to run one or more pilot projects. When organizing these projects you typically do as much as you can to make them successful, such as finding:

Projects where the stakeholders are willing to actively work with you.

IT people who are flexible, willing to try new things, and willing to collaborate with one another.

Finding a project which is of medium complexity (therefore it's "real" in the sense that it's significant to your organization) but not one where it can make or break your organization (therefore it's safe to experiment with).

In North America we refer to this as "cherry picking" because you're picking the cherry/best situation that you can find.

Some thoughts:

Being agile may not have been the primary determinant of success. You set up an environment where you have a good relationship with your stakeholders, where you have good people who want to work together, and the project is challenging but not impossible. Oh, and by the way you adopted a few agile techniques as well. Sounds to me that situation you could have adopted a few not-so-agile techniques instead and still succeed. Although my various project success surveys, see my IT surveys page for details, have shown time and again that agile project teams are more successful than traditional project teams I haven't been able to tease out (yet) whether this success is attributable to agile or just attributable to improved project initiation efforts.

When adopting agile/lean widely across your organization, you can't cherry pick any more. For the past few years I've been working with IT organizations that are in the process of adopting agile/lean strategies across their entire organization, not just across a few pilot projects. What these organizations are finding is that they need to find ways to adopt agile where the business isn't as willing to work with IT, where some of the people aren't so flexible or collaborative, where some of the people are narrowly specialized and not as willing to expand their skills, or where the project exhibits scaling factors which motivates you to tailor your agile approach. It's harder to succeed with agile in these situations because they're not as "cherry" as what you've experienced previously. Luckily, if you've been successful previously then you now have some agile experienced people, you have successes to reference, and you've likely overcome some problems even in the cherry situations which you have learned from. So, your cherry successes will hopefully improve your ability to succeed even in "non cherry" situations.

You need to work smarter, not harder. If the source of your success was actually from improved project initiation practices and not from agile, then recognize that and act accordingly. Realistically part of your success was from that and part was from agile, and the organizations that adopt a measured improvement approach potentially have the data to determine which practices lead to success and which didn't. Without the metrics you're effectively flying blind when it comes to deciding how to improve. There is clearly a mandate for smarter work practices within IT, within your organization as a whole for that matter.

If you want to gain more insight into some of the issues that you'll face when adopting agile across your organization, I suspect that you'll find my recent paper Scaling Agile: An Executive Guide to be interesting. I've got a more detailed paper in the works, so stay tuned to this blog.

A recurring discussion that I have with experienced agile developers is what it means to take a disciplined agile approach. The conversation usually starts off by some saying "but it already requires discipline to do agile", something that I fully agree with, followed by "therefore 'disciplined agile' is merely a marketing term", something which I don't agree with. The challenge with the "standard" agile discipline is that it is often focused on construction activities within a single project team, clearly important but also clearly not the full picture. There's more to an agile project than construction, and there's more to most IT departments than a single development project. In short, there are many opportunities for IT professionals to up their discipline, and thereby up their effectiveness, opportunities which we make explicit in the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) framework.

Let's explore the many aspects to taking a disciplined agile approach:

You adopt "standard" agile discipline. Aspects of agile which require discipline include adopting practices such as test-driven development (TDD), active stakeholder participation, working collaboratively, shortening the feedback cycle, and many more. These strategies are a great start to becoming disciplined IT professionals.

You take a goal-driven approach. When we first started working on the DAD framework I didn't want to create yet another prescriptive framework, particularly given Rational's track record with the Rational Unified Process (RUP) framework. Rational has been pilloried for years for the prescriptive nature of RUP, which is unfortunate because there are a lot of great ideas in RUP that agile teams can benefit from, some of which we adopted in DAD and many of which are being actively reinvented with the agile community even as you read this. Furthermore, there are many prescriptive elements of the Scrum method that can get teams in trouble. For example, Scrum prescribes that you hold a daily stand up meeting, often called a Scrum meeting, where everyone should answer three questions. That's a great approach for teams new to agile, but it proves problematic in many situations due to it's prescriptive nature. Do you really need to do this once a day? I've been on teams where we held coordination meetings twice a day and others only once a week. Do you really need to stand up? I've been on geographically distrubited agile teams where many of us were sitting down during coordination calls. Do you really need to answer three questions, two of which are clearly focused on status regardless of claims otherwise? I've been on lean teams where we met around our Kanban board and focused on potential blockers. The answers to these questions depends on the context of the situation you find yourself in. The challenge, at least from the point of view of a process framework, is how do you avoid falling into the trap of being overly prescriptive. The strategy we adopted in DAD is to take a goal-driven approach. The observation is that regardless of the situation you find yourself in there are common goals your team will need to fulfill. For example, at the beginning of a project common goals include developing an initial plan, initially exploring the scope, initially identifying a technical strategy, and securing initial funding (amongst others). Throughout construction you should coordinate your activities, improve the quality of your ecosystem, and produce a potentially consumable solution on a regular basis (more on this below). So, instead of prescribing a daily stand up meeting the DAD framework instead indicates you should coordinate your activities, and gives several options for doing so (one of which is a Scrum meeting). More importantly DAD describes the advantages and disadvantages of your options so that you can make the choice that's best suited for the situation your team finds itself in (see this blog posting for a detailed example of the types of tables included in the DAD book to help you through such process tailoring decisions). In short, our experience is that it requires discipline to take a goal driven approach to agile delivery over the prescriptive strategies in other agile processes.

You take a context-driven approach. There are many tailoring factors, which I describe in the Software Development Context Framework (SDCF), which you need to consider when making process, tooling, and team structure decisions. For example, a large team will adopt a different collection of practices and tools than a small team. A geographically distributed team will adopt a different strategy than a team that is co-located. You get the idea. Other tailoring factors include compliance, team culture, organization culture, technical complexity, domain complexity, and project type. It requires discipline to recognize the context of the situation you find yourself in and then act accordingly.

You deliver potentially consumable solutions. One of the observations that we made early in the development of the DAD framework was that disciplined agile teams produce potentially consumable solutions, not just potentially shippable software. Although delivery of high-quality, working software is important it is even more important that we deliver high-quality working solutions to our stakeholders. For example, not only are we writing software but we may also be updating the hardware on which it runs, writing supporting documentation, evolving the business processes around the usage of the system, and even evolving the organizational structure of the people working with the system. In other words, disciplined agilists focus on solutions over software. Furthermore, "potentially shippable" isn't sufficient: not only should it be shippable but it should also be usable and should be something people want to use. In other words it should be consumable (a concept DAD adopted from IBM's Outside In Development). Minimally IT professionals should have the skills and desire to produce good software, but what they really need are the skills and desire to provide good solutions. We need strong technical skills, but we also need strong "soft skills" such as user interface design and process design to name just two. The incremental delivery of potentially consumable solutions on an incremental basis requires discipline to do successfully. DAD teams focus on repeatable results not repeatable processes.

You are enterprise aware. Whether you like it or not, as you adopt agile you will constrained by the organizational ecosystem, and you will need to act accordingly. It takes discipline to work with enterprise professionals such as enterprise architects, data admistrators, portfolio managers, or IT governance people who may not be completely agile yet, and have the patience to help them. It takes discipline to work with your operations and support staff in a DevOps manner throughout the lifecycle, particularly when they may not be motivated to do so. It requires discipline to accept and potentially enhance existing corporate development conventions (programming guidelines, data guidelines, UI guidelines, ...). It requires discipline to accept that your organization has an existing technology roadmap that you should be leveraging, building out, and in some cases improving as you go. In short, enterprise awareness requires a level of discipline not typically seen on many agile teams.

You adopt a full delivery lifecycle. Empirically it is very easy to observe that at the beginning of an agile project there are some activities that you need to perform to initiate the project. Similarly at the end of the project there are activities that you need to perform to release the solution into production or the marketplace. The DAD process framework addresses the effort required for the full delivery effort, including project initiation, construction, and deployment. Our experience is that it requires discipline on the part of IT professionals to include explicit phases for Inception/Initation, Construction, and Transition/Deployment and more importantly to focus the appropriate amount of effort on each. One danger of explicit phases is that you run the risk of taking what's known as a Water-Scrum-Fall approach, a term coined by Dave West the person who wrote the forward for the DAD book, where you take an overly heavy/traditional approach to inception and transition in combination with a lighter agile approach to construction. Water-Scrum-Fall occurs because many organizations haven't made a full transition to agile, often because they think it's only applicable to construction. Our experience is that you can be very agile in your approach to inception and transition, experience we've built into the DAD framework. Having said that it clearly requires discipline to keep inception activities short and similarly it requires discipline to reduce the "transition phase" to an activity.

You adopt a wider range of roles. An interesting side effect of adopting a full delivery lifecycle is that you also need to adopt a more robust set of roles. For example, the Scrum method suggests three roles - Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Team Member - a reflection of the Scrum lifecycle's construction focus. DAD suggests three primary roles - Team Lead, Product Owner, Team Member, Architecture Owner, and Stakeholder - as well as five secondary roles which may appear at scale.

You embrace agile governance. Governance establishes chains of responsibil­ity, authority and communication in support of the overall enterprise’s goals and strategy. It also establishes measurements, policies, standards and control mechanisms to enable people to carry out their roles and responsibilities effectively. You do this by balancing risk versus return on investment (ROI), setting in place effective processes and practices, defining the direction and goals for the department, and defining the roles that people play with and within the department. It requires discipline to adopt an agile approach to governance, and that's something built right into the DAD framework.

During the second week of August the Agile 2011 conference was held in Salt Lake City (SLC). As you likely know the Agile Manifesto was formulated 10 years ago in SLC so it was apropos to hold it there. There was some excitement around the 10 year anniversary of the manifesto, with a panel session with the 17 authors of it. Sadly there seemed to be little excitement around the efforts of the 10th anniversay agile workshop in February which proposed a potential path forward for the agile community. I found the conference to be an evolutionary improvement over the conferences of the past few years, which is a very good thing because the focus since 2008 has moved beyond the "cool" new programming techniques to include the issues that enterprises face.

Starting at the Agile 2008 conference I've seen an uptick in interest in what I would consider some of the more mature topics in agile development, although I'm unfortunately still seeing significant confusion out there too, in part due to over-exuberence of people new to agile. For example, there's people still asking about basic issues about agile architecture and agile database techniques, although I was really happy to see more coherent discussions around scaling agile. My own presentation about the Agile Scaling Model was well attended and I suspect I opened a few people's eyes regarding the realities that we face (yes, there's a lot more to it than holding a "scrum of scrums", yeesh). We have a long way to go until people really start to understand scaling issues, but we're clearly on the path to getting there.

The conference show floor was interesting, with a wide range of vendors offering services and products focused on agile and lean. One thing that I noticed was many vendors had large monitors showing off their ability to support lean task boards, which for the most part they all looked the same. At the IBM booth we were showing off some of the Jazz tools, in particular Rational Team Concert (RTC). For a long time now we've been giving away fully functional, with no time limit, licenses of RTC for teams of up to 10 people. Something worth checking out.

The Agile 201x conferences hosted by the Agile Alliance are always a good investment of your time and money, and Agile 2011 was no exception. See you at Agile 2012 in the great state of Texas!

When you’re inside, safe in the warmth of your home watching snow fall on your driveway outside, all snowflakes look the same. But, when you look at a snowflake up close, particularly when you do so under a microscope, you quickly discover that all snowflakes are in fact unique.

It’s the same with IT projects.When you look at them from afar, particularly
from a very high level, they all look the same.However, when you look at them up close, you quickly discover that they too
are unique.The agile scaling factors, which are really just general scaling factors applicable to all types of IT
project regardless of paradigm, help to make this very clear.For example, when it comes to team size some teams
are small, less than ten people perhaps, some are medium sized, and some are very
large (with hundreds of people).When it
comes to distribution some teams are co-located in the same room, some teams
have team members in different cubicles in the same building, some have people
working in different buildings, and some even have people working in different
countries.Many agile teams work in
regulatory environments, in fact the July 2009 DDJ State of the IT Union survey reports that one third of agile teams must
comply to industry regulations, although clearly many agile teams do not have
this as a concern.That’s only three
scaling factors.The point is that a
small, co-located team working in a non-regulatory environment will work much
differently than a fifty-person team working in three different locations,
which in turn works differently than a two hundred person team in the same
building working in a regulatory situation.Different teams, facing different scaling issues will work in different
ways – unique snowflakes from a process point of view.

On Tuesday, Dec 1, 2009 Philippe Kruchten, Bruce MacIsaac, and myself participated on two virtual panels about the future of the Unified Process (we did two to support callers from around the globe) for the Global Rational User's Group (GRUG). During the panel sessions we discussed a bit of the history of the Unified Process, some of the misconceptions people have with it, some of the common mistakes people made implementing it (instantiating it to be documentation heavy and/or serial) due to those misconceptions, how it can be very agile if you choose to instantiate it that way, the OpenUP, the AUP, how UP relates to the IBM Practices, and other topics.

Hope you find it interesting. As I've written in the past, the RUP can be as agile as you want to make it. Furthermore, there are a lot of really good ideas in the RUP that the agile community can and should choose to mine, although sadly I see far too many teams doing things the hard way and reinventing the process wheel on their own. I hope they're enjoying themselves, because it clearly isn't a very efficient way for them to go about process improvement.

When I talk to people about scaling agile techniques, or about agile software development in general, I often put describe strategies in terms of various risks. I find that this is an effective way for people to understand the trade-offs that they're making when they choose one strategy over another. The challenge with this approach is that you need to understand these risks that you're taking on, and the risks that you're mitigating, with the techniques that you adopt. Therein lies the rub, because the purveyors of the various process religions ( oops I mean methodologies) rarely seem to coherently the discuss the risks which people take on (and there's always risk) when following their dogma (oops, I mean sage advice).

For example, consider the risks associated with the various strategies for initially specifying requirements or design. At the one extreme we have the traditional strategy of writing initial detailed speculations, more on this term in a minute, and at the other extreme we have the strategy of just banging out code. In between are Agile Modeling (AM) strategies such as requirements envisioning and architecture envisioning (to name a few AM strategies). Traditionalists will often lean towards the former approach, particularly when several agile scaling factors apply, whereas disciplined agile developers will lean towards initial envisioning. There are risks with both approaches.

Let's consider the risks involved with writing detailed speculations (there's that term again):

You're speculating, not specifying. There is clearly some value with doing some up-front requirements or architecture modeling, although the data regarding the value of modeling is fairly slim (there is a lot of dogma about it though), but that value quickly drops off in practice. However, the more you write the greater the chance that you're speculating what people want (when it comes to requirements) or how you're going to build it (when it comes to architecture/design). Traditionalists will often underestimate the risks that they're taking on when they write big requirements up front (BRUF) , or create big models up front (BMUF) in general, but in the case of BRUF the average is that a large percentage of the functionality produced is never used in practice -- this is because the detailed requirements "specifications" contained many speculations as to what people wanted, many of which proved to be poor guesses in practice.

You're effectively committing to decisions earlier than you should. A side effect of writing detailed speculations is that by putting in the work to document, validate, and then update the detailed speculations the decisions contained in the speculations become firmer and firmer. You're more likely to be willing to change the content of a two-page, high-level overview of your system requirements than you are to change the content of a 200-page requirements speculation that has been laboriously reviewed and accepted by your stakeholders. In effect the decision of what should be built gets "carved in stone" early in the process. One of the principles of lean software development is to defer decisions as late as possible, only making them when you need to, thereby maximizing your flexibility. In this case by making requirements decisions early in the process through writing detailed speculations, you reduce your ability to deliver functionality which meets the actual needs of your stakeholders, thereby increasing project risk.

You're increasing communication risk. We've known for decades that of all the means of communication that we have available to us, that sharing documentation with other people is the riskiest and least effective strategy available to us for communicating information (face-to-face communication around a shared sketching environment is the most effective). At scale, particularly when the team is large or the team geographically distributed, you will need to invest a little more time producing specifications then when the team is co-located, to reduce the inherent risks associated with those scaling factors, but that doesn't give you license to write huge tomes. Agile documentation strategies still apply at scale. Also, if you use more sophisticated tooling you'll find it easier to promote collaboration on agile teams at scale.

You're traveling heavy. Extreme Programming (XP) popularized the concept of traveling light. The basic idea is that any artifact that you create must be maintained throughout the rest of the project (why create a document if you have no intention of keeping it up to date). The implication is that the more artifacts you create the slower you work due to the increased maintenance burden.

You need access to stakeholders. One of the fundamental assumptions of agile approaches is that you'll have active stakeholder participation throughout a project. You need to be able to get information from your stakeholders in a timely manner for the previously listed AM techniques to work effectively. My experience is that this is fairly straightforward to achieve if you educate the business as to the importance of doing so and you stand up and fight for it when you need to. Unfortunately many people don't insist on access to stakeholders and put their projects at risk as a result.

You may still need some documented speculations. As noted previously you may in fact need to invest in some specifications, particularly at scale, although it's important to recognize the associated risks in doing so. For example, in regulatory compliance situations you will find that you need to invest more in documented speculations simply to ensure that you fulfill your regulatory obligations (my advice, as always, is to read the regulations and then address them in a practical manner).

The ways that you approach exploring requirements, and formulating architecture/design, are important success criteria regardless of your process religion/methodology. No strategy is risk free, and every strategy makes sense within given criteria. As an IT professional you need to understand the risks involved with the various techniques so that you can make the trade-offs best suited for your situation. One process size does not fit all.

My final advice is to take a look at the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) framework as it provides a robust strategy for addressing the realities of agile software development in enterprise settings.

There is a distinct rhythm, or cadence, at different levels of the agile process. We call this the agile 3C rhythm, for coordinate, collaborate, and conclude (which is sometimes called stabilize). The agile 3C rhythm occurs at three levels in Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD):

Day. A typical day begins with a short coordination meeting, called a Scrum meeting in the Scrum method. After the daily coordination meeting the team collaborates throughout most of the day to perform their work. The day concludes with a working build, hopefully you had several working builds throughout the day, which depending on your situation may require a bit of stabilization work to achieve.

Iteration. DAD construction iterations begin with an iteration planning session (coordinate) where the team identifies a detailed task list of what needs to be done that iteration. Note that iteration modeling is often part of this effort. Throughout the iteration they collaborate to perform the implementation work. They conclude the iteration by producing a potentially consumable solution, a demo of that solution to key stakeholders, and a retrospective to identify potential improvements in the way that they work.

94% of teams which are claiming to be agile are providing value to stakeholders on a regular basis.

87% of teams which are claiming to be agile are validating their own work.

95% of teams which are claiming to be agile are working closely with stakeholders.

56% of teams which are claiming to be agile are self organizing.

88% of teams which are claiming to be agile are improving the process that they follow throughout the lifecycle.

Teams which are claiming to be agile often aren't. 53% of "agile teams" meet the five criteria, although 72% meet all but the self-organization criteria.

Teams which are moving towards agile but aren't there yet are reasonably close. 39% of those teams meet all five criteria and 63% meet all but self-organization.

I believe that there are several important implications:

Whenever someone claims to be on an agile team you may want to explore that claim a bit deeper.

The low level of self organization may be an indicator of cultural challenges with organizations in that their project managers aren't giving up sufficient control. The Agility at Scale survey in November 2009 found that 59% of respondents who indicated that their organization hadn't adopted agile techniques yet that a rigid culture was hampering their efforts. The IT Governance and Project Management survey in July 2009 discovered that "questionable behaviors", many of which were ethically questionable (I'm being polite), were far too common within IT project management.

Although "agile teams" may not be as agile as they claim, they're still doing better than traditional V-model teams, as revealed (again) by the 2010 IT Project Success survey.

If there was some sort of consensus within the agile community as to the criteria for determining whether a team is agile, I highly suspect that the agileness ratings would increase over time. What gets measured often improves.

However, how agile you are isn't anywhere near as important as getting better at what you're doing. So perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree on this issue. ;-)

An imporant step in scaling your agile strategy is to adopt a Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) approach instead of one which is just focused on agile construction. One aspect of adopting a DAD approach it to mature your focus from just producing software to instead providing a solution which meets the needs of its stakeholders within the appropriate economic, cultural, and technical constraints. The fundamental observation is that as IT professionals we do far more than just develop software. Yes, this is clearly important, but in addressing the needs of our stakeholders we will often:

Provide new or upgraded hardware

Change the business/operational processes which stakeholders follow

Change the organizational structure in which our stakeholders work

Update supporting documentation

And yes, develop high-quality software

Although delivery of high-quality, working software is important it is even more important that we deliver high-quality working solutions to our stakeholders. Minimally IT professionals should have the skills and desire to produce good software, but what they really need are the skills and desire to provide good solutions. We need strong technical skills, but we also need strong "soft skills" such as user interface design and process design to name just two.

The shift to a solution-oriented focus from a software-oriented focus requires your agile teams to address some of the software-oriented prejudices which crept into the Agile Manifesto. The people who wrote the manifesto (which I fully endorse) were for the most part software developers, consultants, and in many cases both. It is little wonder that this group would allow a bias towards software development creep into the language of their manifesto.

Recently I visited a customer who had adopted Scrum. They were a few sprints, what Scrum calls iterations, into the project and were running into some difficulties. Although I was primarily brought in to educate senior management on disciplined agile software development, I was also asked to sit in on the team’s daily stand-up meeting so that I could hopefully provide some suggestions as to how to address the problems they were running into.

Their work area was fairly typical. They had some whiteboards which they were using for project planning and tracking, with sticky notes to indicate what work had been taken on by each team member. The current status of the task (not yet started, in progress, and completed) was indicated by putting each sticky note in a corresponding column for the status and corresponding column for the team member. This allowed everyone on the team to easily share their status and to see the status of everyone else. On the sides were sketches of the architecture as well as some business oriented models. In addition to Scrum the team had adopted several practices from Agile Modeling, in this case they had done some initial requirements envisioning and architecture envisioning, as well as practices from Extreme Programming (XP) for construction. In short, they had followed a fairly common strategy of combining practices from various agile methods.

This would have worked perfectly fine if they had tailored the practices to reflect the situation that they were in, but instead they adopted them "straight out of the book". First, the team was distributed, with most of the team in the location that I was visiting but some people located in two other distant cities. Therein was the source of most of their problems. The people at the other two locations weren’t getting much value out of the daily stand-up meetings, even though they would dial in, because they couldn’t see the project status information. Although people at this location were trying their best to represent these distant people in the daily stand-ups it wasn’t working well – their status information wasn’t being kept up to date and for some people it was a bit of mystery as to what they were actually working on at all.

This team also had 30 people in it, which isn’t a big deal although it can stretch the limits of the simple modeling and planning tools (in this case paper and whiteboards) that they were using. Because the team was larger they were investing a fair bit of time creating burn down charts at both the iteration/sprint and project levels. One of the unfortunate implications of using manual tools for project management is that any associated metric/status reporting in turn becomes manual as well. Considering how the agile community is so concerned with working efficiently, I find it comical that we have a tendency to overlook our own potentially unnecessary bureaucracy such as this.

The problem was that the team was applying strategies, in this case using sticky notes and whiteboards to capture the detailed iteration plan, applying similar strategies to capture key models, and were verbally relaying of status information between sub-teams. There are perfectly fine strategies for smaller co-located teams, but not so good for large or distributed teams. The solution was to recognize that they were in an Agility@Scale situation and needed to tailor their approach to reflect this fact. In this case they needed to forgo some of the manual tools and instead use electronic tooling such as Rational Team Concert (RTC) to share information across disparate locations, in particular the work assignment and corresponding status information. RTC also creates common agile reports such as burn-down charts based on the activities of the developers, providing accurate (nearly) real-time information while removing the burden of status reporting. The RTC project dashboard does more than just this, to see an actual example of one visit www.jazz.net to see the dashboard for the RTC development team itself. You can also see their actual work item list too, a more advanced version of Scrum’s product and sprint backlogs.[Read More]

My new paper Scaling Agile: An Executive Guide is now available. As the title suggests the paper overviews how to scale agile strategies to meet your organization's unique needs.

The executive summary:Agile software development is a highly collaborative, quality-focused approach to software and systems delivery, which emphasizes potentially shippable working solutions produced at regular intervals for review and course correction. Built upon the shoulders of iterative development techniques, and standing in stark contrast to traditional serial or sequential software engineering methods, agile software delivery techniques hold such promise that IBM has begun to adopt agile processes throughout its Software Group, an organization with over 25,000 developers. But how can practices originally designed for small teams (10-12) be “scaled up” for significantly larger operations? The answer is what IBM calls “agility@scale.”

There are two primary aspects of scaling agile techniques that you need to consider. First is scaling agile techniques at the project level to address the unique challenges individual project teams face. This is the focus of the Agile Scaling Model (ASM). Second is scaling your agile strategy across your entire IT department, as appropriate. It is fairly straightforward to apply agile on a handful of projects, but it can be very difficult to evolve your organizational culture and structure to fully adopt the agile way of working.

The Agile Scaling Model (ASM) defines a roadmap for effective adoption and tailoring of agile strategies to meet the unique challenges faced by a software and systems delivery team. Teams must first adopt a disciplined delivery lifecycle that scales mainstream agile construction techniques to address the full delivery process, from project initiation to deployment into production. Then teams must determine which agile scaling factors – team size, geographical distribution, regulatory compliance, domain complexity, organizational distribution, technical complexity, organizational complexity, or enterprise discipline, if any — are applicable to a project team and then tailor their adopted strategies accordingly to address their specific range of complexities.

When scaling agile strategies across your entire IT organization you must effectively address five strategic categories — the Five Ps of IT: People, principles, practices, process, and products (i.e., technology and tooling). Depending on your organizational environment the level of focus on each area will vary. What we are finding within many organizations, including IBM, is that the primary gating factor for scaling agile across your entire organization is your organization’s ability to absorb change.

The explicit phases of the Unified Process -- Inception, Elaboration, Construction, and Transition -- and their milestones are important strategies for scaling agile software development to meet the real-world needs of modern organizations. Yes, I realize that this is heresy for hard-core agilists who can expound upon the evils of serial development, yet these very same people also take a phased approach to development although are loathe to admit it. The issue is that the UP phases are like seasons of a project: although you'll do the same types of activities all throughout a project, the extent to which you do them and the way in which you do them change depending on your goals. For example, at the beginning of a development project if you want to be effective you need to do basic things like identify the scope of the project, identify a viable architecture strategy, start putting together your team, and obtain support for the project. Towards the end of a project your focus is on the activities surrounding the deployment of your system into production, including end-of-lifecycle testing efforts, training, cleaning up of documentation, piloting the system with a subset of users, and so on. In between you focus on building the system, including analysis, design, testing, and coding of it. Your project clearly progresses through different phases, or call them seasons if the term phase doesn't suit you, whether your team is agile or not.

The UP defines four phases, each of which address a different kind of risk:1. Inception. This phase focuses on addressing business risk by having you drive to scope concurrence amongst your stakeholders. Most projects have a wide range of stakeholdres, and if they don't agree to the scope of the project and recognize that others have conflicting or higher priority needs you project risks getting mired in political infighting. In the Eclipse Way this is called the "Warm Up" iteration and in other agile processes "Iteration 0".2. Elaboration. The goal of this phase is to address technical risk by proving the architecture through code. You do this by building and end-to-end skeleton of your system which implements the highest-risk requirements. Some people will say that this approach isn't agile, that your stakeholders should by the only ones to prioritize requirements. Yes, I agree with that, but I also recognize that there are a wide range of stakeholders, including operations people and enterprise architects who are interested in the technical viability of your approach. I've also noticed that the high-risk requirements are often the high-business-value ones anyway, so you usually need to do very little reorganization of your requirements stack.3. Construction. This phase focuses on implementation risk, addressing it through the creation of working software each iteration. This phase is where you put the flesh onto the skeleton.4. Transition. The goal of this phase is to address deployment risk. There is usually a lot more to deploying software than simply copying a few files onto a server, as I indicated above. Deployment is often a complex and difficult task, one which you often need good guidance to succeed at.

Each phase ends with a milestone review, which could be as simple as a short meeting, where you meet with prime stakeholders who will make a "go/no-go" decision regarding your project. They should consider whether the project still makes sense, perhaps the situation has changed, and that you're addressing the project risks appropriately. This is important for "agile in the small" but also for "agile in the large" because at scale your risks are often much greater. Your prime stakeholders should also verify that you have in fact met the criteria for exiting the phase. For example, if you don't have an end-to-end working skeleton of your system then you're not ready to enter the Construction phase. Holding these sorts of milestone reviews improves your IT governance efforts by giving senior management valuable visibility at the level that they actually need: when you have dozens or hundreds of projects underway, you can't attend all of the daily stand up meetings of each team, nor do you even want to read summary status reports.

These milestone reviews enable you to lower project risk. Last Autumn I ran a survey via Dr. Dobb's Journal (www.ddj.com) which explore how people actually define success for IT projects and how successful we really were. We found that when people define success in their own terms that Agile has a 71% success rate compared with 63% for traditional approaches. Although it's nice to that Agile appears to be lower risk than traditional approaches, a 71% success rate still implies a 29% failure rate. The point is that it behooves us to actively monitor development projects to determine if they're on track, and if not either help them to get back on track or cancel them as soon as we possibly can. Hence the importance of occasional milestone reviews where you make go/no-go decisions. If you're interested in the details behind the project, they can be found at http://www.ambysoft.com/surveys/success2007.html .

Done right, phases are critical to your project success, particularly at scale. Yes, the traditional community seems to have gone overboard with phase-based approaches, but that doesn't mean that we need to make the same mistakes. Let's keep the benefit without the cost of needless bureaucracy.[Read More]

I've recently been working with Mark Lines of UPMentors and we've had some interesting discussions around evolving the Agile Manifesto which I thought I would share here to obtain feedback. Note that this is not any sort of official position of IBM, nothing in my blog is by the way (unless explicitly stated so), nor is it some sort of devious plot to take over the agile world (although if we did have some sort of devious plot, we'd make the exact same claim). What we hope to accomplish is to put some ideas out there in the hopes of getting an interesting conversation going.

Over the past decade we’ve applied the ideas captured in the Agile Manifesto and have learned from our experiences doing so. What we’ve learned has motivated us to suggest changes to the manifesto to reflect the enterprise situations which we have applied agile and lean strategies in. We believe that the changes we’re suggesting are straightforward:

Where the original manifesto focused on software development, a term which too many people have understood to mean only software development, we suggest that it should focus on solution delivery.

Where the original focused on customers, a word that for too many people appears to imply only the end users, we suggest that it focus on the full range of stakeholders instead.

Where the original manifesto focused on development teams, we suggest that the overall IT ecosystem and its improvement be taken into consideration.

Where the original manifesto focused on the understanding of, and observations about, software development at the time there has been some very interesting work done within the lean community since then (and to be fair there was very interesting work done within that community long before the Agile Manifesto was written). We believe that the Agile Manifesto can benefit from lean principles.

February 2011: At the 10th Anniversary of the Agile Manifesto get together several people, including myself, brought up the idea of updating the Agile Manifesto. Unfortunately the decision by the original writers of the manifesto was to adopt a very strict, non-agile change management approach where any changes to the manifesto would need the approval of all 17 of them. So, pretty much zero chance of there ever being any changes (hence the lack of changes so far).

June 2012: This extension to the manifesto was retitled "A Disciplined Agile Manifesto" and published as in the book Disciplined Agile Delivery written by myself and Mark Lines.

Rolf Nelson recently recorded a short (5 min) podcast about IBM Rational
Team Concert (RTC). RTC is a complete agile collaborative development
environment providing agile planning, source code management, work item
management, build management, and project health, along with integrated
reporting and process support. I've worked with RTC for a couple of years now and have been truly impressed with it. What should be of interest to many people is the Express-C version which is a free, fully-featured, 10-license version of RTC which can be easily downloaded from www.jazz.net.

Recently I spent some time in the UK with Julian Holmes of Unified Process Mentors. In one of our conversations we deplored what we were seeing in the agile community around certification, in particular what the Scrum community was doing, and he coined the term “integrity debt” to describe the impact it was having on us as IT professionals. Integrity debt is similar to technical debt which refers to the concept that poor quality (either in your code, your user interface, or your data) is a debt that must eventually be paid off through rework. Integrity debt refers to the concept that questionable or unprofessional behavior builds up a debt which must eventually be paid off through the rebuilding of trust with the people that we interact with.
The agile community has been actively increasing their integrity debt through the continuing popularity of Scrum Certification, in particular the program around becoming a Certified Scrum Master (CSM). To become a CSM you currently need to attend, and hopefully pay attention during, a two-day Scrum Master Certification workshop taught by a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST). That’s it. Granted, some CSTs will hold one or more quizzes which you need to pass, an optional practice which isn’t done consistently, to ensure that you pay attention in the workshop.
Scrum Masters, as you know, take the leadership position on a Scrum team. The idea that someone can master team leadership skills after two entire days of training is absurd. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a firm supporter of people increasing their skillset and have no doubt that many of the CSTs deliver really valuable training. However, there is no possible way that you can master a topic, unless it
is truly trivial, in only two days of training. From what I can tell the only thing that is being certified here is that your check didn’t bounce.
The CSM scheme increases the integrity debt of the IT industry by undermining the value of certification. When someone claims that they’re certified there’s an assumption that they had to do something meaningful to earn that certification. Attending a two-day course, and perhaps taking a few quizzes where you parrot back what you’ve heard, clearly isn’t very meaningful. The problem with the term Certified Scrum Master is two-fold: not only does the term Certified imply that the holder of the certification did something to earn it, the term Master implies that they have significant knowledge and expertise gained over years of work.
It is very clear that people are falling for the Scrum certification scheme. A quick search of the web will find job ads requiring that candidates be CSMs, undoubtedly because they don’t realize that there’s no substance behind the certification. Whenever I run into an organization that requires people to be CSMs I walk them through the onerous process of earning the designation and suggest that they
investigate the situation themselves. Invariably, once they recognize the level of deception, the customer drops the requirement that people be CSMs.
Another quick search of the web will find people bragging about being a CSM, presumably being motivated by the employment opportunities within the organizations gullible enough to accept Scrum certification at face value. My experience is that the people claiming to be CSMs are for the most part decent, intelligent people who 99.99% of the time have far more impressive credentials to brag about than taking a two-day course. Yet, for some reason they choose to park their integrity at the door when it comes to Scrum certification. I suspect that this happens in part because they see so many other people doing it, in part because they’re a bit desperate to obtain or retain employment in these tough economic times, and in part because the IT industry doesn’t have a widely accepted code of ethical conduct. These people not only embarrass themselves when they indicate on their business cards or in their email signatures that they’re Certified Scrum Masters they also increase the integrity debt of the agile community as a whole.
Yet another search of the web will find people bragging about being Certified Scrum Trainers (CSTs), the people whom have been blessed by the Scrum Alliance to deliver Scrum master certification courses. Once again, my experience is that these are intelligent, skilled people, albeit ones who have also parked their integrity at the door in the pursuit of a quick buck. Surely these people could make a decent living via more ethical means? I know that many of them have done so in the past, so I would presume that they could do so in the future. The actions of the CSTs increase our integrity debt even further.
The group of people who have most embarrassed themselves, in my opinion, are those whom we consider thought leaders within the agile community. Leaving aside the handful who are directly involved with the Scrum certification industry, the real problem lies with those who have turned a blind eye to all of this. The Scrum certification scheme was allowed to fester within our community because few of our thought leaders had the courage to stand up and publicly state what they were talking about in private. This of course is all the more galling when you consider how much rhetoric there is around the importance of courage on software development projects. As Edmund Burke once observed, all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

There are several things that we can do today to start paying off some of our integrity debt:

Be discerning, not deceptive. If you’re going to list credentials on your email signature or business card then only choose to list the ones that actually mean something.

Educate human resources people. Make them aware of what “Certified Scrum Master” really means and let them think for themselves. I highly suspect that if HR people realized what was going on the demand for CSMs would plummet, and in turn people wouldn’t be tempted by Scrum certification.

Act professional, don’t just claim to be certified. Instead of signing up for every easy certification that comes your way why not simply do a good job and let the people you work with be your claim to fame? The good news is that for the past few years the agile community has tried to pay down some of the IT industry’s integrity debt that we have with our stakeholders by providing better return on investment (ROI), delivering systems which are more effective at addressing the needs of your stakeholders, by working in a more timely manner, and by producing greater quality work. All of these claims are borne out by the 2008 Software Development Project Success Rate Survey by the way.

Recognize that adding a test doesn’t address the underlying problems. For the past year there’s been a move afoot to have people pass a test as part of earning their CSM (apparently it’s been a challenge to create a non-trivial test to validate your understanding of a topic that you can master by taking a two-day training course). This is something that should have been done from the very beginning, along with some sort of peer review, not years later when the damage has been done. Adding a test at this late date isn’t going to remove the stink that’s built up over the years, but sadly it will fool a few people into believing that they’ve covered it up.

Recognize that there is a demand for certification. The agile community needs to put together a decent certification program, something that the Scrum Alliance has clearly failed at doing. My article Coming Soon: Agile Certification provides some thoughts as to what we need to do. The good news is that people such as Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson, and others, are putting together a developer certification program. The really good news is that these are the right people to do this. The really bad news is that they’re doing it under the aegis of the Scrum Alliance, so whatever they accomplish will unfortunately be tainted by the fallout of the CSM debacle.

If we're going to scale agile software development strategies to meet the range of challenges faced by modern organizations, we need to be trustworthy. Is claiming to be a certified master after taking a two-day course an act which engenders trust? I don't think so. As individuals we can choose to do better. As a community we need to.

Over the past few months I've had several people ask me whether it makes sense to offshore agile testing, and more importantly when it makes sense to do so. So I thought I would share my thoughts on the subject:

Focus on whole team testing. The basic strategy is that agile teams should strive to do as much, if not all, of the testing themselves. We call this whole team testing. For organizations new to agile this can be daunting because they may be organized in such a way that programmers write code and then hand it over to testers for validation and verification. The implication is that organizations will need to invest in their staff so that the programmers become more well rounded and pick up testing skills (we refer this as moving from being a specialist to a generalizing specialist).

Offshore entire development teams. A common strategy for organizing geographically distributed agile teams is to have whole teams at each location. For example, if your larger team is spread across three locations - Toronto, London, and Bangalore - then each team is responsible for implementing end to end functionality. With a component-based approach the Toronto team should be fully responsible for one or more subsystems, the London team responsible for one or more subsystems, and the Bangalore team responsible for one or more subsystems. With a feature-team approach the Toronto team would implement all of the functionality, end-to-end, for a feature regardless of which subsystems that functionality affects. Agile teams typically aren't organized by job function (e.g. analysis is done in London, design and coding in Toronto, testing in Bangalore) due to the overhead of handoffs between sites, the increased risk of miscommunication due to less effective ways of communicating information, and the increased complexity of managing the work.

Adopt independent testing at scale. You may choose, or be forced to have, an independent test team that focuses on some of the more complex forms of testing. The general idea is that this team works in parallel to other subteams and tests their working builds on a regular basis. Having said that, the vast majority of the testing effort should still be done in a whole team fashion. If your team is experiencing agile scaling factors such as domain complexity or technical complexity then you may find that it makes economic sense to have an independent test team focus on forms of testing that are difficult for the subteams to address, in particular pre-production system integration testing. If your team is in a regulatory domain where independent testing is required, then you're better off to "shift left" this effort with an independent test team to reduce both cost and risk.

Offshore independent testing carefully. I would offshore independent testing only to organizations that I have a very good, long-term relationship with that have proven that they can work in a disciplined agile manner. I would also want to ensure that they have actual experience with agile independent testing AND are staffing the team with people that have that experience. A clear sign that they don't understand what is required is if the independent testing team is asking for a detailed requirements specification, an indication that they're planning on doing confirmatory testing which is better suited for whole team testing. Furthermore, I would only do this if I don't have adequate staff to do so myself AND do not have time to build up my own independent test team.

I suspect that you're going to find yourself in serious trouble if:

You do not have successful experiences with agile delivery in simpler (e.g. non-offshoring) situations first. Walk before you try to run.

You think you can save money by having agile programming done in one location and agile testing in another (the coordination costs are going to be much larger than you think)

You're offshoring testing because you're new to agile (in this situation you don't have the experience to organize let alone govern the offshored activities)

You work with a service provider where you don't have a proven track record with them when it comes to agile development (a proven track record with traditional approaches is a good start but still very risky)

In short, it can make sense to offshore agile testing in a very narrow range of situations. Be very careful.

In 2009 I wrote a white paper entitled The Agile Scaling Model (ASM): Adapting Agile Methods for Complex Environments for IBM Rational. Apparently it's been taken down, which I think is unfortunate as it contains some interesting ideas that your organization may be able to benefit from.

The original white paper addresses several key issues:

It provides and explains a definition for disciplined agile delivery. A more up to date discussion of DAD can be found on the Disciplined Agile Delivery site.

It describes criteria to determine is a team is agile. I've explored this issue via several surveys over the years since then. See the January 2013 How Agile Are You? results.

It describes the ASM, which distinguishes between core agile development techniques, disciplined agile delivery strategies, and agility at scale. The ASM was superceded in early 2013 by the Software Development Context Framework (SDCF). Perhaps this is why the ASM paper was taken down??

It overviews the eight scaling factors which a delivery team may face, scaling factors which motivate changes in the process that you will follow and the tools that you will adopt. The SDCF provides my recent thoughts regarding scaling factors. I have also run various IT Surveys over the years exploring how well organizations fare at scaling agile.

I was recently involved in an online discussion about how to calculate the benefits realized by software development teams. As with most online discussions it quickly devolved into camps and the conversation didn’t progress much after that. In this case there was what I would characterize as a traditional project camp and a much smaller agile/lean product camp. Although each camp had interesting points, the important thing for me in the conversation was the wide cultural and experience gap between the people involved in the conversation.

The following diagram summarizes the main viewpoints and the differences between them. The traditional project camp promoted a strategy where the potential return on investment (ROI) for a project would be calculated, a decision would be made to finance the project based (partly) on that ROI, the project would run, the solution delivered into production, and then at some point in the future the actual ROI would be calculated. Everyone was a bit vague on how the actual ROI would be calculated, but they agreed that it could be done although would be driven by the context of the situation. Of course several people pointed out that it rarely works that way. Even if the potential ROI was initially calculated it would likely be based on wishful thinking and it would be incredibly unlikely that the actual ROI would be calculated once the solution was in production. This is because few organizations are actually interested in investing the time to do so and some would even be afraid to do so. Hence the planned and actual versions of the traditional strategy in the diagram.

The agile/lean camp had a very different vision. Instead of investing in upfront ROI calculation, which would have required a fair bit of upfront requirements modelling and architectural modelling to get the information, the idea was that we should instead focus on a single feature or small change. If this change made sense to the stakeholders then it would be implemented, typically on the order of days or weeks instead of months, and put quickly into production. If your application is properly instrumented, which is becoming more and more common given the growing adoption of DevOps strategies, you can easily determine whether the addition of the new feature/change adds real value.

Cultural differences get in your way

The traditional project camp certainly believed in their process. In theory it sounded good, and I’m sure you could make it work, but in practice it was very fragile. The long feedback cycle, potentially months if not years, pretty much doomed the traditional approach to measuring benefits of software development to failure. The initial ROI guesstimate was often a work of fiction and rarely would it be compared to actuals. The cultural belief in bureaucracy motivated the traditional project camp to ignore the obvious challenges with their chosen approach.

The agile/lean camp also believed in their strategy. In theory it works very well, and more and more organizations are clearly pulling this off in practice, but it does require great discipline and investment in your environment. In particular, you need investment in modern development practices such as continuous integration (CI), continuous deployment (CD), and instrumented solutions (all important aspects of a disciplined agile DevOps strategy). These are very good things to do anyway, it just so happens that they have an interesting side effect of making it easy (and inexpensive) to measure the actual benefits of changes to your software-based solutions. The cultural belief in short feedback cycles, in taking a series of smaller steps instead of one large one, and in their ability to automate some potentially complex processes motivated the agile/lean camp to see the traditional camp as hopeless and part of the problem.

Several people in the traditional project camp struggled to understand the agile/lean approach, which is certainly understandable given how different that vision is compared with traditional software development environments. Sadly a few of the traditionalists chose to malign the agile/lean strategy instead of respectfully considering it. They missed an excellent opportunity to learn and potentially improve their game. Similarly the agilists started to tune out, dropping out of the conversation and forgoing the opportunity to help others see their point of view. In short, each camp suffered from cultural challenges that prevented them from coherently discussing how to measure the benefits of software development efforts.

How Should You Measure the Effectiveness of Software Development?

Your measurement strategy should meet the following criteria:

Measurements should be actioned. Both the traditional and agile/lean strategies described above meet this criteria in theory. However, because few organizations appear willing to calculate ROI after deployment as the traditional approach recommends, in practice the traditional strategy rarely meets this criteria. It is important to note that I used the word actioned, not actionable. Key difference.

There must be positive value. The total cost of taking a measure must be less than the total value of the improvement in decision making you gain. I think that the traditional strategy falls down dramatically here, which is likely why most organizations don’t actually follow it in practice. The agile/lean strategy can also fall down WRT this criterion but is much less likely to because the feedback cycle between creating the feature and measuring it is so short (and thus it is easier to identify the change in results to the actual change itself).

The measures must reflect the situation you face. There are many things you can measure that can give you insight into the ROI of your software development efforts. Changes in sales levels, how often given screen or function is invoked, savings incurred from a new way of working, improved timeliness of information (and thereby potentially better decision making), customer retention, customer return rate, and many others. What questions are important to you right now? What measures can help provide insight into those questions? It depends on the situation that you face, there are no hard and fast rules. For a better understanding of complexity factors faced by teams, see The Software Development Context Framework.

The measures should be difficult to game. Once again, traditional falls down here. ROI estimates are notoriously flakey because they require people to make guesses about costs, revenues, time frames, and other issues. The measurements coming out of your instrumented applications are very difficult to game because they’re being generated as the result of doing your day-to-day business.

The strategy must be compatible with your organization. Once again, this is a “it depends” type of situation. Can you imagine trying to convince an agile team to adopt the traditional strategy, or vice versa? Yes, you can choose to improve over time.

Not surprisingly, I put a lot more faith in the agile/lean approach to measuring value. Having said that, I do respect the traditional strategy as there are some situations where it may in fact work. Just not as many as traditional protagonists may believe.

At Agile 2009 in August Sue McKinney, VP of Development Transformation with IBM Software Group, was interviewed by DZone's Nitin Bharti about IBM's experiences adopting agile techniques. There are over 25,000 developers within IBM Software Group alone. Follow the link to the interview to view it online (there is also a text transcript posted there. There's some great insights into the realities of scaling agile in large teams, in distributed agile development, and in particular how to transform a large organization's development staff.